CHILD ENDANGERMENT

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have child endangerment laws in some form—laws that prohibit adults from endangering a child’s welfare. These laws define and penalize acts or omissions by adults that puts a child in situations where their health or life is at risk.

Rock Creek is a waterway in Washington, D.C. which has warnings and official regulations that prohibit swimming, even wading in the creek due to high levels of bacteria, particularly the E-coli fecal bacteria, and raw sewage contaminating the waterway. It is not the kind of place where a responsible parent or grandparent would take their young children for an afternoon swim.

Unless, of course, you are the nation’s health secretary and your name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Video photos recently surfaced showing RFKJr. frolicking in this cesspool of human and animal feces with his grandchildren. The health secretary, who had stripped down to his jeans, was seen submerging himself under the water, presumably to get the full taste and flavor of the water while the children joyfully splashed around in the shit-infested water.

This is not the normal kind of family activity a responsible parent or grandparent would engage their children or grandchildren in. The average parent and/or grandparent would heed the warning signs and obey the regulations barring public swimming in a contaminated, high health-risk waterway.

But for a grandparent like RFKJr. who has a history of using a chainsaw to sever the head of a dead whale in Massachusetts, tie it down on top of the family vehicle with your children in the vehicle, and drive to New York with it leaking whale juice into the vehicle; who picked up a dead bear cub struck by a vehicle with the intention of skinning it and using the meat before dropping the carcass off in a local park so as not to be late for a dinner engagement; and who walked around for years with a dead two-foot parasitic, pork tapeworm in his brain while the worm ate portions of the brain before dying, skinny-dipping in a sewage pond would seem like a normal, environmental friendly “family outing.”

However, by any legal yardstick, Kennedy’s jaunt into the E-coli waterway was child endangerment, either warranting a criminal charge or an official citation for a regulatory violation.

Of course, that will never happen.

And why not?

Because, as poor people have lamented for years, “there are laws for the rich and there are laws for the poor.” This little social refrain comes from an 1830 novel, The King’s Own, written by English Royal Naval officer and novelist Captain Fredrick Marryat who coined the phrase, “one law for the rich and another law for the poor.”

That’s just the way things are in a “normal” civilized society, especially the kind of society Americans are living in today. It has always been that way ever since man climbed down out of the trees, scratched his ass, and came to an almost immediate realization that the man with the biggest club rules the forest.

That has been the one cultural and social denominator in every society, barbaric and civilized alike, since man’s first leap from tree to ground: a rich person gets a slap on the wrist for a transgression while the poor person gets a foot in the ass.

But there is one thing that puzzles me about RFKJr.’s dip in the shit-pond. He didn’t wear a bathing suit. He skinny-dipped in his jeans. That means he had to sit his wet, nasty ass on the car seat when he drove away. And did he wear those jeans back to the health secretary’s office or perhaps to another dinner engagement?

And the poor parents of the children at some point had to escort the children to a bath for, hopefully, a proper cleaning—and it is not known whether the parents either knew about or approved of the swimming jaunt. It’s hard to believe they would approve it.

But, as I said, there are rules for the rich and rules (or consequences) for the poor.